Wordcamp Portland 2010 was a great experience. I figured this conference matched some of my goals like becoming more versatile at using WordPress. The reason is that I have found the joy of working on WordPress. To date I have had the opportunity to work on 7 sites that operate off of the CMS. To say, I have found that WordPress is the tool that I have grown to love and use. That being said there were a few things that I learned from Wordcamp Portland that I simply want to share.
The first comes about child themes. I had on many occasions look with jealousy at sites that had custom themes. I would look at the code wondering if the site was hand coded simply to find that they were operating on WordPress. The CSS files had what I like to call a branded css file. Now I know. It is a child theme and you can learn all about it from WordPress on how to build one out. But I will simply cover it.
1) Choose a theme you like. The nice thing with this is that you reduce the amount of time that it takes to hand code something from scratch. Then activate the file.
2) Create a new folder or directory under your themes section. You want to go to your site file transfer and open up the folder under WP-Content > Themes. Here is where you title your custom theme as the folder.
3) Now make a css file with this included.
/*
Theme Name: Your Theme Name
Theme URI: http://www. YourSiteHere .com/
Description: Description of your theme here
Author: Your Name Here
Template:twentyten < This tells what theme is based off
Version 1.0 <What Version of the theme>
*/
@import url(‘../themename/style.css’); (This is the theme you are calling. So whatever theme this is you want where I have put themename to be the title). For instance if you use Twenty Ten you want the folder to be name twentyten.
The import is the most important aspect. Without it you will not have it working off of the framework of the pre-existing site work.
4) Save this under your new folder. Now go back to your WordPress control panel and activate the theme.
You can make edits in your css file for any or all of the preexisiting file you are calling. For instance if you want to make an edit to the body tag you can simply do the change in your css file and it will override that one element in the css file calling without editing the whole css file.
The second was about plugins that different users had installed. I will write about them soon.